Shield of Stars Read online

  “Is that why you learned to use a knife?” Weasel asked. She’d attached the sheath to her own belt and slid it behind her hip so the skirts of her coat concealed it, but Weasel hadn’t forgotten it was there. “I’d think a pistol would be easier for you, and more deadly.”

  “Yes, but Gabbo didn’t have a pistol.”

  Weasel stopped, staring. “Are you saying that if Gabbo’d had a pistol, you’d have taken that away from him? Just like you took the knife?”

  “Of course not,” said Arisa.

  Weasel felt his shoulders sag with relief. At least she wasn’t crazy enough to—

  “When you take a pistol from someone you have to push their hand up. So if they fire, the ball goes into the ceiling. And you have to be closer when you start your move too. And besides …”

  The quiver in her voice gave her away.

  “You’re putting me on!” Weasel exclaimed, and she broke down and laughed aloud.

  “You should have seen your face.”

  She was joking. He was almost sure of it. He was about to pursue the matter further when something caught his gaze.

  “Why is there a doll nailed to that fence?” he asked. “I’ve been seeing them all day.”

  “It’s not a doll,” said Arisa. “Remember when I told you that in the country, worship of the old gods was more a matter of customs than of real faith? This is the kind of thing I mean. The farmer who owns this field may never have prayed to any god in his life, but he still puts up a straw lady to bring the Lady’s blessing to his crop.”

  “The Lady. Is she one of the old gods? Or goddesses?” Weasel knew very little about the old gods, he suddenly realized, beyond the teaching of the One God’s priests that they were all false gods, and the followers of the One God should avoid such heathen abominations.

  “She’s the only god anyone in the country mentions much,” said Arisa. “And again, it’s more a matter of putting up a straw lady, or saying things like ‘Lady bless us!’ when a goodwife hears some scandalous gossip.”

  “So it’s more like … like a superstition than a real faith. Like thinking anyone with the sword and shield that were lost is the true king of Deorthas.”

  Arisa snorted. “It’s not that whoever has them is the true king. Unless they’ve been destroyed, someone else has them right now. What the old folks say is that the true king’s power comes from the sword and the shield. That since they were lost, the kings aren’t half the kings they were ‘in the old days.’ But since kings have been ruling without them for centuries, that’s clearly just another foolish country superstition. One so silly that your Regent Pettibone has offered a thousand gold blessings to get them back.”

  Weasel grinned. “Your point. But he’s not my regent. And the reason he wants the sword and shield, according to Justice Holis, is because it would make the country folk happier with his rule. Just like he’s tried to please the townsmen by enforcing the end-of-shift bell.”

  “Does he really enforce that?” Arisa asked curiously. “I’ve heard that lots of mill workers are kept at their jobs long past the end of the workday, till they’re almost dropping from exhaustion. And that if they complain, their employers fire them and find someone poor and desperate enough to take their place. But I wondered…. Parents mostly tell that kind of story when their children start talking about going to the city to get better jobs.”

  “It’s sort of true and sort of not,” Weasel told her. “Some owners stop the work shift right on the bell, unless they have an urgent job. And those owners, the good ones, will pay a bit extra if they keep their people over. The bad ones …”

  He looked at the rain-washed fields, empty except for twittering birds that fluttered from bush to bush. He could understand why someone would get bored with it, but still …

  “I wouldn’t advise people to go to the city for a job. Not unless they’re already skilled in some trade, and even then they could get into a bad situation pretty easily.”

  “So if the regent’s enforcing the end of shift, he’s doing something good,” said Arisa thoughtfully.

  “Yes,” Weasel admitted. It was one of the few things the regent had done that Justice Holis approved of. “Pettibone’s city-bred. Justice Holis says that Pettibone believes that he took over the regency so he could fix the city’s problems.”

  Arisa grinned. “But you don’t believe it?”

  “If someone gains a lot of wealth or power by doing something, I don’t look very hard for another motive. But Justice Holis says people are more complex than that, and he’s usually right. On the other hand, Pettibone started his regency by hanging half the navy, so it’s hard to believe that mercy was his main motivation.”

  “Even in the country we know about that,” said Arisa. “He hanged only officers, but many of the common sailors are countrymen, and they talk about it.”

  “He didn’t really hang half the navy,” Weasel admitted. “Just the officers who supported Admiral Hastings’ bid for the regency.”

  “But that was more than half the officers,” said Arisa. “And the king had chosen Admiral Hastings as regent. It was his right, his duty, to—”

  “He claimed that the king had chosen him,” Weasel interrupted. “No documents confirming that were ever found.”

  “Of course not. Pettibone was the chief justice, and he had control of the palace for more than a week after the king’s death. He’d been feuding with the admiral for years, because the admiral was trying to persuade the king to stop favoring the city over the country! Pettibone would have destroyed anything that supported the admiral. And if he had the right, why hang not only the admiral, but all the officers who were loyal to him? If the lord commander of the army hadn’t backed Pettibone against the navy, he wouldn’t be regent today!”

  Justice Holis had considered the loyalty of the army key to the conspiracy’s success, but Weasel wasn’t about to discuss that with someone who was almost a stranger—and a curiously well-informed stranger, at that.

  “You know a lot about this for a country girl.”

  Arisa shrugged. “Country folk don’t like Regent Pettibone. Which you should understand, since you tried to overthrow him yourself.”

  “Not me!” Weasel exclaimed. “I only copied letters for Justice Holis. I don’t care who rules anything, as long as I can keep out of their way.”

  Arisa came to a stop, right in front of a large puddle, staring at him. “You don’t mean that. You were involved in the conspiracy.”

  “Justice Holis was involved,” said Weasel. “And look where it got him.”

  “But … but if you see injustice, if you see that things are wrong, you have to care! You have to try to fix them.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Weasel, picking his way through the mud-filled ruts. “It’s stupid to care.”

  Arisa followed him. “So you think I’m stupid to help you find the Hidden?”

  “Ah …”

  “Why would I do that, if I didn’t care about injustice? And want to stop it?”

  “We haven’t even tried to find them yet,” Weasel complained.

  “We’ve just reached the outskirts of the Falcon’s territory,” Arisa told him. “I’ll ask at the village where we stop this evening. I’m not afraid to do what’s right!”

  Washing a mountain of dirty dishes bought Weasel and Arisa dinner, breakfast, and a pallet on the floor in the inn’s laundry room. The floor was stone, and noise from the kitchen, which lay on the other side of the open hearth, carried through—but as Arisa pointed out, at least it was warm.

  They were wakened in the morning by the innkeeper’s wife, when she let the laundresses in. She wore a lace-trimmed cap instead of the more usual kerchief, and her manner was brisk, but not unkind.

  Weasel was stumbling off to wash when Arisa grabbed his arm. “Goodwife, may we ask you something? It’s a bit private.”

  Surprise deepened the lines on the woman’s forehead. “You can ask anything, though I make no pro
mise to answer.”

  She gestured for Arisa and Weasel to follow her into the corridor, which was empty at this early hour. She folded her arms and waited.

  “My friend here is trying to find the Hidden,” Arisa said bluntly. “Nothing harmful to them or him. He needs some information they might have.”

  The woman’s eyes widened. “I can’t help you there, m’girl. I don’t know anyone who follows the old faith. Or if I do, I don’t know it.”

  “Oh, I figured that,” said Arisa swiftly. “It just seemed to me that you’d meet a lot of people. In an inn, and all. You might be in a position to spread word that he’s looking.”

  “I might at that,” said the woman. “But I don’t know if I should. Bluntly, m’boy, I’d advise you to find some other source of information. The Hidden don’t want to be found.”

  “I understand,” said Weasel, fighting down a surge of disappointment. “If I could pay—”

  “It’s important,” Arisa interrupted. “Important to him, and might be desperately important to other good folks. He’s city-bred,” she added apologetically, though Weasel had no idea what she was apologizing for.

  “Humph.” The woman looked back and forth between them. “Well, this has been an odd conversation. It’s probably worth gossiping about. What direction are you going from here?”

  “West,” said Arisa. “All the way to Thimbleton, in time. Thank you, goodwife. Thank you very much.”

  “Why did you thank her?” Weasel asked, as they trudged along the footpath beside the road. It was drier today, the One God be praised. “She didn’t offer to contact the Hidden. She didn’t offer to do anything except gossip.”

  Arisa rolled her eyes in disgust. “And you thought you didn’t need a guide.”

  “You said you were my bodyguard.”

  “Whatever. But gossip spreads in the countryside. If there are any Hidden within twenty miles of that village, within a few days they’ll know you’re looking for them. What they do about it is up to them.”

  “I don’t want to do them any harm,” Weasel told her. “I want to ask a favor!”

  “Yes, but they can’t be sure of that. You could be a One God fanatic, plotting to assassinate them all.”

  “Then they could turn me in to the guard,” said Weasel, skirting a puddle. “The law says that violence will not be tolerated in any god’s name. That’s why the Hidden faith was forbidden in the first place, because of the sacrifices. Any One God follower who commits violence against the Hidden is breaking the law and can be punished.”

  “That may be the law on the books,” said Arisa. “But it will only be law in reality if someone enforces it.”

  “No one can enforce it if the Hidden don’t complain,” Weasel pointed out.

  “But in order to complain they have to admit to being followers of the Hidden faith, and then they get arrested for that. Which reminds me, what were you doing trying to pay that woman?”

  “I wasn’t trying to pay her. We don’t have anything to pay her with. I was apologizing for not being able to make it worth her while. Why should she do favors for me?”

  “Because you need help,” said Arisa. “Because it’s important. Isn’t your God’s main teaching that people should care about each other?”

  “‘Man must look after man,’” Weasel quoted. “That’s why he’s not my god. I care about me first, me second, and nobody else. That’s how you survive. Caring about people gets you into as much trouble as caring about causes.”

  “Really? Then why are you tramping down the road, with no money, looking for people who might kill you, if you don’t care about your justice?”

  Weasel scowled. “That’s different. Justice Holis is … is …”

  Arisa waited.

  “… different.”

  Arisa laughed. “Why? You care about him.”

  “And look at the trouble it’s gotten me into,” Weasel told her gloomily. “I might not even survive it.”

  That afternoon they swept out a bakeshop in exchange for several loaves of day-old bread, and the baker’s grandmother agreed to gossip with her customers about a young city boy who was looking for the Hidden as he traveled the road to the west.

  They reached Huckstable that evening and while they waited tables in the common room, to earn their supper and bed, Arisa found a couple of old men who weren’t averse to spreading a bit of gossip.

  For luncheon the next afternoon they mucked out a cattle pen, finding no one to spread their message except the cows. And before they could reach the next town, the rain carne on.

  The morning had started out clear, but by noon a brisk breeze was pushing heavy clouds across the sky, and by midafternoon the thunderheads had grouped together like a gang of street toughs, rumbling to warn the ordinary citizens of their intent.

  Arisa spotted the hay shed just as the first thick drops began to fall. They raced over the stubbled fields and reached its shelter moments before the skies opened and the torrent poured down.

  “Too bad it’s so cold,” Weasel said, half-shouting to make himself heard over the pounding of rain on the roof. “We could almost bathe in this.”

  “At least we’re dry.”

  “Until the roof starts to leak.”

  Arisa gave him a disgusted look. “It’s a hay shed, city boy. If the roof leaks, the hay gets moldy. Hay sheds have the best roofs in the countryside.”

  Weasel was skeptical, but the roof proved amazingly tight, and nestling into the hay offered them a bit of warmth as they watched the hard rain settle into a steady drizzle.

  “It’ll be over in a few hours,” Arisa predicted. “We can make it to the next inn, though it may be dark by the time we get there.”

  “But until then we’re stuck here,” said Weasel. Only eleven days till Justice Holis’ trial began. Of course trials could last for weeks, or months … or days, if Regent Pettibone wanted them to end quickly.

  “Unless you want to walk in the rain, catch pneumonia, and—”

  “I’m not stupid,” said Weasel. “It’s just … Never mind. I wish we had a deck of cards or some dice. At least we’d have something to do.”

  Arisa laughed. “Hasn’t anybody told you to be careful what you wish for?” She lifted the battered satchel onto her lap and dug into it, finally pulling out a deck of arcana cards. “Wish and it shall be granted!”

  “I wish for a hot pork pie.”

  “One miracle at a time.”

  “I’ll take it,” said Weasel happily. He swept hay off a section of the floor. “Four-card runs, chaos is out, not wild, and two hundred points ends a round. Or do you prefer three-card runs?”

  Arisa was already shuffling, with a deftness that should have warned him. “Three-card runs are for babes and amateurs. What are we playing for?”

  “What have we got?” Weasel asked.

  Over the next several hours, Weasel’s vast fortune of hay gradually became Arisa’s even vaster fortune of hay.

  “We’d better stop,” she said finally. “I win the rest of the stack, and you won’t have anything left to tuck into. You’d freeze. Besides, it’s beginning to let up.”

  Weasel looked out at the rain. It was lessening, but it still fell steadily. He had no desire to be drenched. “Not quite yet. Who taught you to play arcanara? Will he teach me?”

  “He’s a friend of my mother’s,” Arisa told him. “And I don’t know if he’d teach you or not. He might, if you happen to meet him.”

  “Oh. One of those friends?”

  “You can say smuggler here. There’s no one around to eavesdrop except the mice, and they don’t talk to the law.”

  Weasel shuffled the cards idly, liking the feel of the deck. He cut it and looked down at the pictured woman. Wind swirled her archaic gown and flung her black hair out like a banner. She walked upon storm clouds, and lightning shot from the places where she stepped.

  “The storm. How appropriate.”

  “Not really. The storm doesn’t
mean a simple storm, it signifies anything that brings good and bad in the same package. Floods, but also water for crops. A lot of the water cards are like that.”

  “It signifies? You’re not one of those … I mean, you don’t believe you can tell fortunes with these things, do you?”

  Arisa’s chin rose defiantly. “Yes. Haven’t you ever had your fortune told with cards?”

  “I’ve seen people do it. Make a fair amount of money at it too. But it’s only …”

  “… a foolish country superstition? It isn’t. These cards, the images, they used to be the old gods. A lot of them, at least. That’s why the storm isn’t shown as just a storm, it’s the goddess of storms. The man who taught me to tell fortunes—this is a different man, not the one who taught me to play arcanara—he said almost all the cards with a person on them used to be gods, and even some that don’t show people. Here.” She took the deck and sorted through it. “The lady of stones. She’s the Lady. The one the country folk care about. She’s the goddess of earth and harvest. If she comes up in your fortune, she signifies wealth, fertility, and peace.”

  “Could I skip the fertility part?” Weasel asked. “Who wants a pile of brats to feed?”

  Arisa shrugged. “I think you’d find peace pretty boring too.”

  “You’re wrong about that.” Weasel watched the cards flow through her hands. “I’ve had too much excitement in my life. I like peace.”

  Arisa looked skeptical.

  “I do! But I’ve seen con men telling fortunes. It’s pretty obvious that they just interpret the cards into whatever their mark wants to hear.”

  “That’s true,” Arisa admitted. “For people who don’t have any withe. But if you have got withe, my friend said it surfaces when you tell the cards. He said I had quite a lot of it.”

  “With? With what?”

  “Withe,” said Arisa patiently. “It sounds the same, but it’s a thing in itself. It means being one with the earth; with Deorthas’ earth magic. Just a minute.”